Reddit was goining the way of the other big tech players, removing API for third party apps, maybe will remove old.reddit.com next ? force everyone to sign-up using their phone number, using your real names instead of nicknames, verifying your identity using goverment issued ID.
the sign is on the wall but the majority of people are fine with that, look how facebook hit the record of 3 billion users a month. these corps are too big to fail.
A limited blackout did nothing to change Reddit’s mind. Periodically asking users if they want to end the Blackout did not help since as dissatisfied users left for Discord or Lemmy, the voters became biased toward ending the Blackout.
In the future, boycotting and demanding that advertisers cancel ad revenue would be far more effective. Lawsuits about Reddit restoring user content involuntarily may still do damage but not quickly enough to help the protest.
Reddit was the problem anyone couldn’t solve. I’m glad I did witnessed the greateast ending on r/Place this year before decided to delete my Reddit account, and yeah fuck u/spez!
Autocratic platform CEO doing his thing. Nobody ask what went wrong with the peacefull protest in North Korea and why did Kim not step down or change his mind. We got digitally slaughtered and are now in heaven (lemmy).
RIF kinda still works for me, I can browse but can’t post or upvote so that’s good enough for me but I have cut down browsing Reddit loads since the protests
I think the only thing that could have been done better if for mods to more rapidly migrate to other plate forms and leave a detail message on the locked subreddit about why and how to move to the platform.
I’m not saying that it has to be Lemmy, but it would have been nice if it were.
As far as the protests go, they were quite successful. Reddit’s traffic went massively down; users, especially power users who uploaded content and moderated subreddits, left the site; and Lemmy became a viable alternative to Reddit with the influx of users. Reddit is still struggling to replace the moderators who quit, and they’ve been forced to take desperate actions like reinstating r/place and paying users who get a lot of upvotes to keep traffic on the site. The decision was never going to be reversed, the old free API scheme legitimately cost Reddit money and forcing users to use the official app like every other major social media has meant they could collect more data on users to sell. But as far as what the protest accomplished besides reversing the decision, it massively hurt Reddit and bolstered Lemmy into being a viable replacement
Everything that has a beginning has an ending (perhaps with a long tail). Perhaps the only wrong thing is that we forgot about that. All of these Internet services tend to have a long tail, most of everything we remember once using is still around in some form barely being used but for a tiny and loyal user base that is still hanging in there for some reason.
None of these things were great in and of themselves, it was always the community.
Third party apps still seem to work still, just logging in is broken on some. Not sure if reddit just “forgot” to disable anyonymous access or if they realized doing so would probably result in DDOSing themselves like twitter did.
The only thing I can think of was that the mods announced a time limit of 48 hours for the protests, but I’m not sure that making all the protests indefinite would have solved anything.
Spez was determined to copy Elon Musk even though Elon clearly doesn’t know how to run a social media platform. Now both Reddit and Twitter are dying.
The fact that Reddit moderators quickly folded the moment Spez threatened to take their “powers” away made the whole thing quickly fail. Very few had the balls to go through with the protests and didn’t care about those imaginary powers (honorable mention to the former r/interestingasfuck mods), but many were too addicted to that fake status symbol to even imagine letting go of it and Spez took advantage of that to kill the protests.
For those of us who left Reddit and mostly only use Lemmy now, I believe the 3rd party apps thing was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think it’s just that we already hated Reddit so much that when presented with Lemmy we immediately jumped ship.
For many other Redditors however the appocalypse didn’t make any difference, many big subreddits are still very active and the Reddit moderators who folded realized they don’t want to lose their control over those subs and all the potential that control gives them (monetization via partnerships with brands, sponsored AMAs, selling film rights like one former mod of r/wallstreetbets did, shilling your new app, website or crypto like again r/wallstreetbets mods did etc…).
The mistake in these protests was to assume that Reddit mods would align with the interests of 3rd party app users.
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